In retail stores, items of high value and popularity are often promoted using displays in special locations of high visibility inside the retail store. These special locations often include ends of aisles or on countertops inside particular departments at which consumers are likely to interact with the special items. For various reasons, retailers are intensely interested in the level and nature of human activity surrounding the special items, in particular, the physical handling of these items. One source of interest to retailers is the concern of potential theft of the item. Another aspect of interest to retailers deals with how the handling of the item correlates with the presentation and offering of the item. For example, retailers may want to know whether the price and placement of the item, coupled with all of the influencing factors such as advertising, store lighting and store-wide sales promotions have resulted in a net increase or decrease in the amount of physical attention that the retail demo item garners. This is particularly true for certain high-value or high-interest items, or promotional items which have special correlation with general store performance or sales of a particular store department.
Some retailers employ tethers such as wires and cables attached to retail items on display in order to protect specially displayed retail items and collect motion data. For example, a security device may be tethered to a retail item on display in which a wire or set of wires conveys motion data of the item to a computer hidden under or inside the display fixture surface. However, tethers are often unsightly, and make handling of the tethered retail item awkward.
While point of sale (POS) data is readily available to retailers, it is difficult to use POS data to determine whether item placement in a store is good or bad. For example, reviewing POS data is often not a good indicator of item placement since price has such a profound influence on the decision to buy. The decision to investigate and the decision to buy are very different, i.e., these decisions are dependent on different factors. In other words, it is very difficult to measure how an item is being handled inside the retail store because this information is independent of POS data. While video surveillance can be used in some cases to monitor customer behavior, it is difficult to implement in a manner which allows for automated determination of specific customer behavior such as the handling of a given retail item. In general, such implementations of video surveillance technology are labor-intensive, complex, and expensive.
Another source of interest that a retailer might have in the direct physical handling of retail items within a store has to do with deployment of sales associates. For example, retailers want their sale employees to spend a relatively large amount of their time dealing face-to-face with the shopper who is most interested in the high-profile retail item on display. However, at the present time, the retailer must rely upon high levels of staffing to assure that shoppers will have an opportunity to deal face-to-face with a store associate at the time of the buying decision. While using a large number of store associates on the sales floor at any one time may increase the amount of face time store employees have with shoppers, high-staffing levels have the disadvantage of high labor costs and training.